[Related: Etiquette for People Who Aren’t Attracted To Trans Women]
I notice that conversations about desexualization are particularly prone to people misunderstanding each other. For instance, many people seem to round any conversation about desexualization off to telling people that they have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with, and then say something along the lines of “didn’t the gay rights movement prove that no one should have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with? Rapist!” Many other people assume that the first group’s concerns are a smokescreen for not wanting to deal with their own bigotry, and thus assume that they could not have any reasonable concerns about compulsory sexuality.
I don’t have a lot to say to the second group at this time (although theunitofcaring’s Meditation on Boundaries, which has been recently going around again, is excellent, and I endorse her statement that all conversations about desexualization need to begin from the baseline that people should promptly say “no” to intimate activities that they don’t want). But I recently found an article from a few years back that I think might help explain the second group’s position to my readers who are prone to the “rapist” thing. (Please note that the author of the article is pretty mean to techies, and if you don’t want to read that you may want to skip the quoted bit.)
Here’s an excerpt:
You might think an abundance of men is a great thing, but as a wise woman once said, “The odds may be good, but the goods are odd.”
“I’ve lived in Seattle for seven years, single most of them,” Annie Pardo, a 31-year-old freelance event and communications consultant in Seattle, wrote in an email. “The only thing that has changed is the increase in men I’d never want to go out on a date with.” She added, “Can’t believe they actually strap on those new employee book bags.”
For Reifman, the number of men versus women presents a challenge for guys like him—he can’t seem to get a date or hold the attention of the women he’s courting because, presumably, he’s got so much competition. But the reality is that all he has to do is have a personality. I’m serious.
The exact same scenario has been playing out in San Francisco for the last few years. One woman, Violet, a 33-year-old who has lived in the Bay Area for eight years, with one of those in the “belly of the beast,” Palo Alto, experienced many of the same things I and other women did. They had money, but they were boring. They had a lot to say about their job, but their development as a complete human being seemed to be stunted. And they exhibited little to no interest in the other person at the table.
“There were a lot of tech men. I could talk a blue streak about them. I don’t have much positive to say. The biggest thing, the thing that bothered me the most is I felt like my intelligence was greatly devalued,” she wrote. ”I am a smart woman. I have a master’s from Berkeley in philosophy. My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence. I constantly felt like I wasn’t seen or valued by them, even though I experienced a lot of them as having a very limited view of the world.”
Carla Swiryn, a matchmatcher for Three Day Rule, a start-up that offers curated online dating services in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, said that her female clients are often hit with a double whammy: “I often hear women say they either date A-holes or nerds—or if they’re really lucky, both in one,” she said. “They feel like they’re dealing with someone who has poor social skills, not a lot of style, and isn’t that attractive, or is decently good-looking, successful, or cool, but by default knows it and acts like it, with a huge ego and selfish mind-set in tow.”
One woman, Bridget Arlene, spent three years in Seattle for graduate school, and said that she actually moved out of the city, in part because of the type of available men—most of whom had computer science or engineering degrees and worked for Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. “The type of person who is attracted to these jobs and thus to the Seattle area seems to be a socially awkward, emotionally stunted, sheltered, strangely entitled, and/or a misogynistic individual,” she wrote in an email. Arlene said that she was once contacted by a Microsoft programmer on OKCupid who required that she read Neuromancer before “he would consider taking me out on a date. He was not joking.”
It goes on like that for a while, but you get the general idea.
So here’s my guess on the reaction of most of my readers to this article:
- You are totally allowed to have a preference not to date nerds, but it is neither kind nor necessary to write thousands of words exploring exactly how undateable you find us.
- There are lots of women who want to date nerds, actually? Maybe you shouldn’t assume your own particular sexual preferences apply to every fucking woman on the planet? Lots of women don’t find “socially awkward with a poor fashion sense” to be a dealbreaker. Lots of women are socially awkward and have terrible fashion sense themselves!
- You are not actually entitled to a dating market that only has people you find attractive in it. People you don’t find attractive are allowed to try to find love too. “Asking you out while being incompatible” is not something people are doing to you.
- Obviously everyone is allowed to have their own dealbreakers, even if some of their dealbreakers are kind of stupid. But god, maybe you could try being a little more open-minded? You might be swept off your feet by a really great guy who happens to wear a new employee book bag. Also, fashion sense is totally a solvable problem, you can say to your new boyfriend “give me a $500 budget and I will buy you clothes that fit.”
- Good fucking riddance, lady, if you’re going to be this much of an asshole we don’t want to date you either.
In particular, that last point is something I want to highlight. It is desirable that the author of this article become less of an asshole, in the same way it’s desirable that any person become less of an asshole. Presumably, if she became less of an asshole, she’d be more open-minded about dating people that she currently considers to be emotionally stunted sheltered man-children with poor fashion sense and an aversion to spending money on messenger bags. But that doesn’t mean you want her to skip the “become less of an asshole” part and start dating techies right now. For one thing, then some innocent techie would be saddled with a girlfriend who hates him. For another thing, being open to dating techies is a predicted consequence of the thing you actually care about, which is her not being an asshole. If she kept her preferences once she became less of an asshole, but no longer wrote long articles about how horrible people she happens to not be attracted to are, then this would also be a fine outcome. “If you did X morally good thing, then you would probably also behave like Y” is a different claim from “you should behave like Y.” You don’t actually want people to date people they despise.
And in my experience those points are what most people who talk about desexualization in an anti-oppression context– whether it’s about race, transness, gender expression, disability, or size– are actually saying. There are legitimate complaints one can have about another person’s sex-related behavior, which are not the same thing as trying to make them have sex they don’t want.
Ampersand said:
Great post!
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leviriet said:
I think a major difference here is moralization. If I don’t want to date techies, this is viewed as morally acceptable. If I don’t want to date trans people, a large number of people will castigate me for this. I am likely to lose social status if a trans person says that I didn’t go out with them solely because they are trans. Furthermore, I live in an environment where most people are willing to go out with techies, to the extent that it’s more or less assumed. As a result, if I am equally attracted to techies and non-techies, I am under no social pressure to “prove” this by dating techies. I think a lot of the fear comes from the belief that this isn’t true with trans people. If I don’t go out with a particular trans person and I don’t have good defensive arguments, I may be labelled a bigot, shunned, and exiled.
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Feo Takahari said:
“Hell no, I won’t go out with you! You’re a total dick!”
“Excuse me?”
“Hold on, let me rephrase that . . .”
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echo said:
Exactly. Transsexuals complain about a “cotton ceiling” as if women not wanting to have sex with them is illegal discrimination. While that claim is still on the table, there should be no compromise.
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HorribleHumanBeing said:
Complaints about the cotton ceiling tend to come from the same place as the complaints, almost always from cis people, that men are intimidated by Strong Women. Or that women don’t appreciate Nice Guys. It stings when the people you’re into don’t reciprocate. And while that frustration is neither the most pleasant nor the most productive thing, it’s a fairly universal human reaction.
The loud “you’re a horrible bigot if you don’t date trans people” is an unfortunate combination of loud virtue signaling, and the way that gender is a popular issue nowadays. Still, the number of people who do that (even including cis allies in those numbers) is tiny compared to the number of trans people out there. So while it’s not wrong to ask why the specific case (pressuring folk into dating trans folk they otherwise aren’t into) is okay while the general case (pressuring people into dating generic classes of people they aren’t into), focusing too much on the trans angle winds up doing more splash damage to bystanders than I’m really comfortable with.
(Doubly so on the latter case because other desexualized minorities don’t seem to trigger nearly the same force of debates. That you have people digging trenches over the morality of dating trans people who don’t get nearly so fired up about the intellectually disabled or the unfortunately colored makes the debates seem even more like referendums on transness.)
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gazeboist said:
A question on this extremely narrow point in your excellent comment:
Is it common for ethnicities to be desexualized (in Western media, anyway)? The only two that I can think of are East Asian men (sort of) and Middle Eastern women, and even then I’ve never noticed any real life impact of those tropes, the way there is for trans people. Of course I’m neither of these groups, so maybe I just don’t see it.
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echo said:
“That you have people digging trenches over the morality of dating trans people who don’t get nearly so fired up about the intellectually disabled or the unfortunately colored makes the debates seem even more like referendums on transness.”
Because nobody is trying to force anyone to do that, but use “referendums on transness” as a bullying tactic. Be careful, because people are going to start to vote “no”.
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ozymandias said:
There is definitely discourse about desexualization and race, the fuck are you talking about?
Also, if your acceptance of a group of people is contingent on there not being any assholes in that group, you never really accepted them in the first place.
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echo said:
If that group’s willing to let those assholes be their spokespersxns, ok.
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echo said:
“The second is the idea that “trans” isn’t a legitimate reason to reject somebody as a romantic/sexual prospect, to which I respond, very firmly, that nobody gets to say that a reason for rejection is illegitimate.”
“veronica dsaid:
Well, it is manifestly transphobic, so whatever. Transphobic people are a dime a dozen. I’m not going to worry about one more.”
Yeah. So much for the “but nobody here is saying that!” argument.
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HorribleHumanBeing said:
@gazeboist: Race and dating is its own massive topic that I only briefly touched on because it was only tangentially related to the topic at hand. A fuller unpacking would have to touch on a lot of other issues. (E.G: black people are often seen as hypersexualized, but not people you’d get seriously involved with.) Since you also have transness being oddly sexualized as well as desexualized, I went with one word for the sake of brevity
@echo: On one level, I agree. The best thing that can happen for literally any minority group is to be seen as just another normal bunch of people. The pace of progress for gay rights being the clearest example of this; look at how their image has adapted over the last decade+ and tell me it doesn’t look deliberately curated. If you want to be an ally, slow but steady humanization is the best tactic.
On the other hand, though, it isn’t really possible for a group to reel in every idiot with a megaphone. Some are assholes, some have new convert’s zeal, some are more concerned with broadcasting their status as allies than they are with long term effectiveness. Don’t be an idiot with a megaphone, feel free to leave any scene that’s heavy with idiots with megaphones, but realize the broad group can’t control them any better than you can. And if you’re smart, keep an ear out for the reasonable people on the other side who are also getting shouted over.
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Neb said:
@echo
I think part of your problem is that you’re conflating ‘does doing something show bad traits about a person’ and ‘should they be forcibly stopped from doing it’.
As a non-sex analogy, let’s say someone hangs up a poster in their bedroom that says “gay people are gross and disgusting and should not be allowed to marry”. That person is a homophobe, doing this says bad things about them, etc. But that’s different from saying they don’t get to do it, which they do.
Similarly, if someone otherwise wants to have sex with someone, but due to finding the info ‘they are trans’ now doesn’t want to have to do with them anymore, it is highly, highly likely that person is transphobic. But, they still indeed get to do that! The answer to them being transphobic isn’t ‘rape them’. (again, similarly, if someone wanted to have sex with me, then found out I was Jewish and didn’t want to have to do with me anymore, it is highly likely they are antisemetic. They also still get to not have sex with me.) No reasons for rejection are *illegitimate*, in the sense that none of them are justifications to rape the person. A bigoted reason is in fact still legitimate that way. It’s just – also bigoted.
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gazeboist said:
Ok, I see what you’re saying. I definitely see black people mostly hypersexualized and trans people mostly desexualized, but there’s definitely a psuedo-reactive sense to it, like trans people are desexualized in response to an imagined hypersexuality, and the same is true for blacks, just with different aspects of the phenomenon emphasized.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Wow that article makes me mad.
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LeeEsq said:
Yes, it really isn’t so much about what they are looking for but how they express what they are looking for. Not wanting to date nerds or techies or socially awkward people is fine because most people have some arbitrary criteria and turn offs when its comes to dating. Its the disdain expressed at nerds or techies that provides the anger. The assumption seems to be that the mere existence of nerds and techies are an affront to all right-thinking women and anybody who believes otherwise is morally wrong and must be aware of that fact.
And that really is the point of the post. Date you want to date and don’t date who you don’t want to date but do not treat the people who don’t want to date as an affront and offense to all right thinking people.
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veronica d said:
It’s certainly not a “nice” article.
Still, I think this stuff is important to talk about. The fact is, there do seem to be a lot of lonely men in tech, so if a fair number of women are shying away from “tech guy,” well they probably have a mix of good and bad reasons.
For example, if a woman has repeated experiences of invalidation while dating “nerds,” then it’s maybe a real thing in nerd culture.
And I’ll say straight up, heck yeah it is. STEM-bro elitism is very real. Attitudes such as, “I can install Linux device drivers so I know more than you about literary history” are commonplace. You can chalk this up as social awkwardness, and to a degree it is, but it is also manifest arrogance.
You don’t have to be that way. I cannot help being trans. Short guys cannot help being short. This doesn’t anyone has to date me who doesn’t want to, just as I can be a “height-ist” if that’s how I roll. (It isn’t, for the record.) But if someone is self-centered or dismissive — those are skills you can work on, but first you need to know they are a problem.
They are a problem.
If a “tech backpack” becomes a red flag to some women, perhaps they are making a rational decision. After all, dating sucks for everyone. Women are not wrong to want to date fun, pleasant, and interesting people, and to avoid dating the opposite. If a backpack is a strong signal, it will be observed. (For example, I avoid nerdy guys in fedoras, for obvious reasons.)
(I suppose “fedora guy” will likewise avoid me because I have “social justice hair.” Somehow I’ll survive.)
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Yeah, it definitely sounds like there are legitimately bad experiences in there, and to a lesser extent legitimately bad behavior as well. But the author doesn’t seem to even try to separate “actually bad behavior” from “thing I happen to not like” from “neutral thing that happens to correlate” and ends up exuding a blanket undifferentiated disgust towards a bunch of people who really don’t deserve it. It over-universalizes in two different directions – all tech guys are like this, and all women hate this – both of which I object to.
It’s totally fine for her to notice that guys who work in tech usually have traits that make them bad partners for her, and decide not to date them. But as Ozy said, writing an article full of broadly applied contempt is really not necessary.
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Jared said:
She’s guilty of the same intellectual arrogance in the other direction! She quotes approvingly, “My brain is very abstract, though, the exact opposite of so many men in tech who have very concrete/literal brains. They interpreted information as intelligence.” This is a red flag for, “I ultimately conceive of quantitative, analytical reasoning as some sort of complicated accounting, and view my sort of reasoning as real intelligence.” She doesn’t say that exactly, but I assume a lot of what she was complaining about was just as much implicit rather than explicit.
It’s possible to criticize without casting aspersions in the way that you did, merely complaining that the men have an arrogant sense of STEM supremacy, but I don’t think it’s fair to read that paragraph as such.
Do you really think this person understands that math and CS are all about abstraction, and that it would be laughable to apply her criticism as such to an arrogant but successful mathematician? No, it’s just intellectual arrogance in the other direction.
Also, that was a pretty extreme tough love post even by your standards, “You can do better than be self-centered and dismissive [sure…], but then women will pattern match you against that based on your backpack anyway, and they are right to do so.” [For the latter part, my opinion is precisely the “well, whatever, sounds like a win-win if no one involved in this article likes me, but they don’t have to be a dick about correlates of the problematic behavior”, that to me is the thrust of Ozy’s post.]
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Jared said:
Ack, big typo! I wrote, “It’s possible to criticize without casting aspersions in the way that you did”, but I meant that you were the one who criticized bad behavior without casting aspersions on analytical reasoning, while she did cast such aspersions.
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veronica d said:
But the situations are not symmetrical. After all, we’re not talking about solving the big-picture tensions between STEM and the humanities. Instead, we’re talking about conversational dynamics on a date. Now certainly it is possible that the women in question think that they are smarter than the men, that the women won’t stop talking, that they won’t listen, that they speak over the men, invalidate their opinions, etc.
— but actually no, that’s almost certainly not what is happening, at least not to any significant proportion. Instead, it is the men who behave that way.
And I assure you, they do. That is the problem. Furthermore, when you look at the gender ratios in the big tech hubs, along with the number of men in tech who are deeply miserable because of their dating prospects, well gosh-darnit you guys should listen.
Speaking for myself, I long ago accepted a kind of dialectic synthesis between STEM-thinking styles and the humanities. Certainly I am the former, MATH-GIRL! (RAH!), very STEM, but at some point I realized that people aren’t always impressed by my “winning arguments” on dates. Winning an argument on a date, or being “the knower,” or “holding forth,” is often a sure path to a “thank you, nice evening,” and then no returned calls. (Or worse, breadsticks.)
Consider instead a sharing of knowledge, where both parties are invested in validating the other, where you each explore the other’s ideas and thinking styles — that can lead to kisses.
No really, explore, listen, engage, validate. These things work.
Do as thou will.
#####
Another important point from the article: the women seem to think that the men think that their money should get them an “in” with women. Evidently this “in” is quite limited.
Hmmm.
“He’s rich, but dammit you can’t actually talk to the guy.”
It seems strangely possible that these women are actually not shallow. It is worth considering.
#####
The thing no one is talking about: neurodiversity. The counterpoint: these are skills that can be learned. They are worth learning.
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Jared said:
Of course the intellectual arrogance situations are not symmetric, but nonetheless, if someone complains about STEM arrogance while implying in the same paragraph that they think STEM-style intelligence is lists of concrete facts, I’m going to laugh at them.
And your latest comment is more the sort of veronica d tough love that I expect in these threads. As to the basic advice, I endorse it.
But I would also like to convince readers that my comment that it’s “win-win if no one involved in this article likes me” is more than sour grapes, in order to properly express my disdain for the article. This is tricky without sounding like Internet braggadocio, but I will try.
I’m not experienced with the strategies for frequent hook-ups, and in fact I haven’t even been on a date recently. However, in the past year, I’ve had a woman with whom I was cuddling randomly squeal and shiver and explain herself by saying that I seemed smart, while we were talking about energy policy or something where neither of us was an expert. I’ve also had dates where I pulled back to safe yuppie topics as I could see that nerdiness made gears start to grind, and then I never found out whether or not they’d return my calls. (I’m not claiming I’m such a catch that I disappointed them, but I think I’d had qualified for a second date or two. If a date doesn’t say much about your interests but “wow, that’s so complicated” while smiling, that’s a pretty clear sign that you have a chance if you just keep to normal topics.)
There simply is no reason for all pairs of people to try to be interested in each other, and no one would object when I prefer women like the former over the latter. Then why do articles like that make me seethe, if not sour grapes?
Let’s try an analogy. Suppose a techie from NYC moved to Missouri to supervise a new data center, and then wrote a long article about how this ruined his dating life because so many women in Missouri are disgustingly fat. Suppose, in between the not-so-thinly-veiled contempt and indignation, the author had a few valid pieces of advice and a few valid complaints (perhaps, that it’s ridiculous to use pictures from five years ago when everyone and their dog has a camera). Suppose you were a fit, conventionally attractive woman who’d lost a bunch of weight and suppose you even thought some of the points in the article were valid as I described. What would your overall opinion about the author be?
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veronica d said:
The thing is, I’m broadly sympathetic to fat people. They get a raw deal in life. Likewise, I think that short dudes have a legitimate gripe. So complaining about fat people or short dudes or whatever — that seems out of line.
It seems very different to criticize personality and character, in particular when those criticisms seem broadly accurate. This, of course, becomes a question of where your sympathies lie. I don’t think we’ll find an objective answer. But still…
#####
Both men and women put out thinkpieces that express their frustrations with dating. This seems a reasonable thing to do, inasmuch as life can be frustrating and sharing those frustration can be useful. (Sometimes. It depends.)
There is an interesting asymmetry between the two, however. For men, the prototypical complaint is “nice guys finish last.” After all, how many men frustrated with dating articles boil down to that one complaint?
For women, their prototypical compliant is about the never ending parade of low quality, thirsty dudes.
I have zero sympathy for the “nice guys.” Should I have sympathy for the women?
Well, what do we think of the contemporary dating landscape? What do men bring to the table? What do women bring?
This is about who sets the standards. If someone sets them too high, they’ll likely miss opportunities. If they set them too low, they’ll end up with duds. So, is there a right level?
What role does freedom play? What about emotional maturity and acceptance?
I think the so called “crisis of masculinity” is very real. There is something summed up in every Judd Aptow character, something about perpetual adolescence and a failure to adjust.
#####
Speaking with maximum generality, I think women seem more powerful in a dating context because we (on average) handle being alone better. Thus we can set our standards higher. Much falls out from this basic fact.
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I’m not sure what she meant by “abstraction.” It seems a weird complaint, inasmuch as the problem STEM types have is seldom a lack of abstraction, but instead it’s a kind of rigidity of thought compounded by insecurity and terrible social calibration. So I don’t know. I’m curious. That said, I have encountered naked, unabashed anti-STEM nonsense. This seemed more mild than that. In any case, I’m willing to give her a charitable reading. Perhaps she means something different by “abstraction” than what I do. Perhaps she found the style of abstraction from the STEM dudes she dated to be wildly boring. If she made that comment on a date, I would ask her to explain. Then I would listen and engage.
She might just be a jerk. It’s possible. On the other hand, the average STEM dude is average.
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Johannes said:
“Speaking with maximum generality, I think women seem more powerful in a dating context because we (on average) handle being alone better. Thus we can set our standards higher. Much falls out from this basic fact.”
That’s one way of putting that “basic fact”. Another, more precise way, is to simply come clean and admit that women’s libidos (in general) are low compared to men’s. That is to say, women, according to almost all studies and polls done on the subject, have a (in general, exceptions exist, everyone is an individual et cetera et cetera) significantly weaker sexual drive.
In the meta-study “Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive? Theoretical
Views, Conceptual Distinctions, and a Review of Relevant Evidence”, from Case Western University, Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen R. Catanese, and Kathleen D. Vohs go through a veritable buttload of studies into human sexuality. Their summary of the results is quite sobering:
“Across many different studies and measures, men have been shown to have more frequent and more intense sexual desires than women, as reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex, frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners,masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures. No contrary findings (indicating stronger sexual motivation among women) were found.”
You can find similar results in a bunch of other studies and meta-studies. But hell, you don’t even really need the studies. Observing the dating scene between men and women is enough, as is reading any pseudo-scientific article on the subject. Here’s one from the Daily Mail (shit source I know, but in this specific case it’s actually worth reading), in which a woman decides to take revenge for all the women “harassed” with unwanted dick-pics by sending pussy-pics to men. The results? All men who responded did so positively. Of the 40 guys she sent to, 37 (!) responded positively. 3 didn’t respond at all. If you doubt the results, do the experiment yourself! I can almost guarantee you it will end up the same way.
(Source): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3327641/Single-woman-turns-tables-men-sends-potential-dates-unsolicited-pictures-vagina-horrified-respond-crude-enthusiasm.html
I can post more proof upon request.
Besides the data evidence, there’s also the inferences we can make from observations further than the line. Almost everything we would expect to see if women in general had lower libidos than men, we see. Women having higher standards? Check. Men having trouble obtaining both relationships and (especially) sex? Check. Women responding poorly to immediate and crude suggestions of sex or sexting? Double check and amen.
I know I’m going on a tangent here, but this is important. It goes out to everbody here, including Ozy (sort of, don’t know zir’s exact position regarding the gender’s sexual motivation): if you really want to construct a correct model of human sexual and romantic behaviour, which I think you do, you absolutely, positively must use this fact as the foundation. Attempting to play off the mountains of evidence in any way, for example by claiming it is a result of women lying and obfuscating in polls, leaves you with a view of sexual dynamics that is fatally flawed.
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Aapje said:
@Veronica d
The right level for themselves is presumably the level at which a person accepts the risk to stay alone that is the consequence of their standards.
Aside from the ‘right’ level, you also have a ‘fair’ level, which can be argued to be when both partners bring about the same to the table. This is of course very subjective and you clearly believe that men generally bring much less to the table.
One can of course also argue that women are in fact bringing less to the table than they think and/or that the demands that women place on men are higher than the demands that men place on women. The latter would explain both the frustration of women at the small quantity of men that exists who can meet those standards, as well as the frustration of men who have several favorable traits, yet still fail to attract someone who brings about the same to the table.
Society is set up so that women can meet more of their needs (like emotional support) when being single. So what you say is partially true, but it’s not an inherent quality of women, but more a consequence of the gender roles.
Another important factor is that on average, men tend to favor traits that correlate with youth, while women tend to favor traits that correlate with older age. Women also have a limit on their fertility and tend to get far more desperate near that limit.
The logical result is that dating is bad for young men and (somewhat) older women.
I think that a ‘crisis of femininity’ is a major reason why feminism took off. Various inventions like the washing machine and the refrigerator made running the household a lot easier, causing housewives both to lose status and get bored. Simultaneously, working conditions got better. So the female gender role became less satisfying and the male gender role more so.
Over the last decades, the male gender role has been getting worse, as the provider role has weakened, both due stagnating wages as well as higher costs of (acceptable) living, often requiring two salaries. Furthermore, respect for the male gender role has severely declined. In the past, a man got a lot of respect for providing, protecting, being able to fix stuff, etc. Nowadays, a man is ‘equal’ if he does that plus half of negative parts of the female gender role, like doing the housework (to the woman’s standards, of course).
In the past, men would be free at first and then turn ‘adult’, whereupon they got to make major sacrifices in return for a decent payoff. Nowadays, the demands and expectations are higher, while the payoff has deteriorated, so it’s not surprising that more and more men are choosing perpetual adolescence. You blame men for doing this to themselves, but society is shaped by men and women together. It’s not fair to blame harmful gender roles on just one gender.
PS. I disagree that most complaints by men boil down to ‘nice guys finish last,’ especially in the ‘Nice Guy who is really a misogynist’ way. That is a small minority of what I see.
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veronica d said:
Men and women vary. I’m speaking of broad trends.
The way I see it, greater freedom and independence are self-justifying. Women have become more independent, which in fact was an explicit goal of feminism. The logic went thus: if women have more financial independence, they will in turn gain social and romantic independence. That has (to a fair degree) happened. It is good.
Men (#notallmen) have not kept up. Specifically, it is not unfair to expect men to show the same levels of independence and emotional intelligence that women show. If they fail to do so, that’s on them.
In other words, we might choose to be a nurturing partner to some man. We might not. We are free.
There is no lack of women willing to give advice to men on how to become more emotionally mature. The quality of that advice will vary, just as the quality of human insight varies. But (often enough) it is given in good faith.
That said, we won’t force you. We won’t drag you kicking and screaming. If you prefer to stay home and play video games or lust after 2d women, well enjoy your life. I guess. It seems pathetic, but you are free.
Women are not oppressing men. Some men feel oppressed, sometimes based on sexual harassment policies or what happened in divorce court. This, however, is not oppression. Instead, this is life in a large social system where things are not always completely fair.
Quite a few men feel oppressed because their sexual desires are not being met.
Hopefully I don’t need to explain why I completely and utterly reject that. It is probably true that men often have strong libidos. It is equally true that, in a free society, managing your libido is your responsibility. Sex is something done with other people. It should be done freely. If you cannot find a partner, then you’ll have to find other outlets.
It is your responsibility to make your life work.
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Johannes said:
veronica d: Lots of men not getting laid and ending up frustrated, while not a world-ending problem, is very much sub-optimal from a human-wellness-perspective. Now granted, you are obviously (extremely obviously!) correct in stating that it is not the responsibility of any woman, anywhere, to “put up” and thereby solve things. However, that doesn’t mean we can just dump all the responsibility on the failing men either. As you admit, men have higher libidos, and therefore probably suffer more from failing to get laid; that’s as good a reason as any to try and figure out a solution to the problem.
Even more importantly – it’s reason to clearly state the underlying cause of their woes (women’s low libido, or if you want to reverse it, their high one). It’s one thing to have a problem, another entirely to have a problem AND to be lied to about the cause of the problem.
That being said, I admit I don’t have a solution. Men and women’s sexual behaviour is the result thousands of years of evolution and optimisation. It’s not the sort of thing you can really change. But I do think we need to start speaking openly and honestly about these issues, because they are only going to grow bigger going forward, and the only way we’re going to have any chance of solving it is through clear and open communication.
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veronica d said:
Should implies can.
Regarding “what to do about it,” my suggestion is clear: encourage men to increase their independence and emotional intelligence. Likewise we can analyze masculine social structures to clarify what blocks their growth.
I think we do this already, quite a lot.
Of course, there is also the issue of how to craft the message so men will receive it well. That turns out to be a hard problem.
However, there is an even harder meta-problem, which is how to address social problems in the context of a free society. If women refuse to give up their gains, and if men refuse to adjust to the new reality, then what can we do besides speak truth and let things fall out.
For example, it is certainly true that some women are sexually submissive. However, that does not imply they want to be socially submissive in a non-sexual context. Nor does it imply they want to be submissive to some random man. Furthermore, while they may fantasize about “Christian Grey” (or perhaps “Mr. Big” for more vanilla women), they nevertheless must deal with the reality of the actual men in their dating pool.
My impression is women do an okay job of this. I know quite a few women involved in BDSM. They know that Christian Grey is a fictional character. They understand that it might be fun to “play at” that sort of thing, but it is not reality.
I know guys who believe they’re married to their pillow case, which contains a 2d image of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl with impossibly large breasts.
You are free. But pillow cases are not real people.
I am obligated to treat people with civility. I am not obligated to get them laid, nor to solve their obsession with anime girls. I can explain why I think they fail at romance. I can point out aspects of contemporary culture that hurt them. I can suggest alternate strategies and viewpoints that might help. Having done this, I believe I’ve met any obligation I have to the lovelorn.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
It’s really weird to complain that men haven’t kept up with the level of independence of women, when many different facts show that women (on average) still have far less independence than men. Women work fewer hours, choose jobs with lower salaries, use government services more, are more likely to get alimony + child support, expect (more) benevolent sexism, get more emotional support from their friends, etc, etc. To equalize the gender roles, a more logical change would be for men to become more dependent, as this would bring the genders closer together. Instead, you want to increase (parts of) the male gender roles, which is something that I frequently see in feminism.
Secondly, people are not truly free to choose, as social policing and sexual pressures reward certain behavior and punish other behavior. Is this not Social Justice 101? Do you also think that it is fair and effective to demand that individual women solve their eating disorders, rather than demanding societal changes to reduce the pressure to be (overly) thin? Or do just men get to solve their problems on their own? How is this not a patriarchal belief?
Talking about sexual pressures, women rate men less attractive for showing the happiness than for posturing. Seems like men reduce their romantic chances if they are not sufficiently stoic.
You are using the rather common and infuriating feminist rhetorical trick of defining the part of the social (and legal) system which harms men as something that individual men somehow can and must resist/fix, while the part of the social system which harms women is somehow completely different, requiring societal change. I see this trick as a rationalization for sexist bias.
It’s undeniably true that women (also) enforce gender norms on both men and women. That makes women co-responsible for upholding gender norms and the negative consequences; so they need to change to solve the problems, along with men.
When the new reality allows women to do things that men do not, supports women while men don’t get the same support in similar situations, teaches men different strategies/skills, etc; then men don’t have the same ability to adjust as women. And even if they could, feminists have never argued that women should just adjust, but that society should change. Why wouldn’t the same be necessary for men?
Of course you can claim that men have a responsibility to fight this inequality, but what they face is not equal to what those who fight and fought for women’s rights face(d). For example, feminists were able to take advantage of the patriarchal belief that women should be far more protected from physical harm than men, to fight gender norm enforcement by way of violence. Such a strategy is far less effective for men. Another example is that benevolent sexism dictates that men have great responsibility for making women’s lives better. So those who fight to protect female privilege benefit from this, while the men who fought/fight to protect male privilege didn’t have this advantage.
When it comes to men, your normal contribution is to strongly oppose them getting social justice and to victim blame them for everything bad that happens to them. Do you think that this makes (your brand of) feminism attractive to unhappy men?
PS. It’s absurd to portray men who ‘marry their pillow cases’ as somehow representative of the men with dating problems. It really says a lot about you that you engage in this kind of behavior.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
BTW, you can also easily argue that women have not adapted to the new reality, given their complaints.
Women tend to demand that men are comparatively well educated and comparatively decent earners, while men are much more willing to accept partners with much less education and earnings, favoring other traits more. These are inherently imbalanced demands, which can only work when the supply and demand is similarly imbalanced, where men are better educated and better earners on average.
An obvious change is that women have gotten better educated and are earning better than in the past, so the logical consequence is that there are far fewer men who are comparatively well educated and have comparatively decent earnings than there were in the past. So with unchanged demands, you’d expect see quite a few highly educated and better earning women unable to find a mate that matches their demands.
To give a simplified example, imagine two men and two women (the numbers are a combined value for their education and earning power): M1, M2, W1, W2. If both genders would have a strict demand to have equal or higher numbers, the only viable pairing is M1-W1 and M2-W2. With an imbalanced demand where only men are willing to date lower numbers, you can also have M2-W1, which would then leave M1 and W2 as incompatible ‘left-overs.’ This is exactly the outcome that many women are complaining about.
So this desire by women to have more men who meet their very high demands is essentially a demand for gender inequality. It can only work if women go back to having substantially less education + earnings than men or if men are somehow forced to perform much better than women (but the traditional gender norms are already pressuring men to do that, so you’d need to double down on the patriarchal pressures on men). The only alternatives are for women to accept having a far higher chance to be single (which the complaining women clearly don’t or they wouldn’t complain) or to lower their demands and have men raise their standards when it comes to education and earnings, so men and women have more equal demands. This seems like the gender equality solution.
This situation is actually a very good case to explain the problems of modern mainstream feminism. Because there is strong bias against even entertaining the idea that women have a major part in perpetuating gender norms and instead a strong belief that women are merely acted upon & powerless, you get these situations where women who demand things that can only happen though inequality/gender norms/patriarchy are told that they are right to demand gender inequality.
This then makes many men (and quite a few women) confused, angry, give up on seeking equality and/or other such things, because they hear a demand for equality, but simultaneously see demands for inequality by the same people. You can never meet conflicting demands, no matter how emotionally mature you are.
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veronica d said:
I suppose “independent” is not the perfect word. What I mean here is withing a relationship/sexual context. I’m talking mostly about the ability women seem to have to “take it or leave it” when it comes to romance. I do not mean social isolation. You are correct that women seem to maintain intimate-but-not-sexual/romantic relationships better than men do. That said, women are not preventing men from doing this.
Women are also more likely to seek out therapy. They are more likely to engage with “self help.” In other words, we’re more prone to “work on ourselves.” This makes a huge difference in how we weather adversity.
One reason that women have sought greater economic independence is quite specifically to achieve greater freedom in our personal lives, which includes the freedom to choose our friends and partners. Men have the same freedom. In a sense they always have.
This is not some profound metaphysical freedom that eclipses any social context. I’m speaking within the bounds of social possibility.
Most women are feminine and attracted to masculine men. Most men are masculine and attracted to feminine women. This probably won’t change. That said, no one should be shamed for having a non-standard gender or sexuality, so long as they respect consent. No one should be bullied.
When you say women need to change, if you mean they should never bully anyone, I agree. If you mean they shouldn’t mock (for example) short men, I agree. If you mean they should change their gender expression or sexual attractions to meet your interests, then sorry no.
If you mean they should desire people they do not organically desire, then again, sorry no.
If you mean they should do emotional labor for insecure “nice guys,” who will then turn around and complain about the “friendzone,” then once again, sorry no.
So what do you mean? Be specific.
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Sometimes I get the vague sense you are saying that women should strategically apply our romantic/sexual interest to manipulate men into being better people. You don’t say that directly, not in “so many words,” but it feels like a subtext.
The answer: no. Instead women will apply our romantic/sexual interest to maximize our life satisfaction.
Well, sometimes. Not every woman is infinitely wise. Sometimes we make bad relationship choices. I’ve made a few.
Live and learn.
#####
That paper you linked to shows a gendered difference between expressed emotion and sexual attractiveness, at least in still photographs. What’s the takeaway?
I would suggest that, when it makes sense to feel happy, then express happiness; when it makes sense to feel pride, then express pride; when it makes sense to feel shame, then express shame. Once you have “express the sensible emotion” skill down pat, then work on improving your life. Do fewer shameful things. Try to be happy. Work to achieve things that make you proud.
This is the “emotional intelligence” thing I keep mentioning.
If women don’t like you, then either change or do not change, according to why they don’t like you and what you want to be. If literally no women are interested in you, then that’s a clue.
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veronica d said:
Yes, if women want men with higher salaries, while they themselves are earning relatively more than in prior decades, then there will be a smaller pool of men from which to choose. Therefore, women will either have to lower their standards regarding salary, or abandon monogamy, or accept being alone, or some combination.
Logic is logical.
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NN said:
But women do lie and obfuscate about this kind of thing in polls. We know this because polls about number of sexual partners produce results that are mathematically impossible, and that women give significantly different answers when they are hooked up to fake lie detectors.
I’m not disputing your general thesis,* but women lying about sex-related topics really does seem to be a major problem with this line of research.
* Though I think there is a decent amount of evidence that, at the very least, sex differences in levels of sexual desire aren’t the sole reason for the dynamics that you talk about. Just to give one piece, a study of prostitutes in New York City found that 20-40% of their transactions didn’t involve sex.
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Johannes said:
@NN
Fair enough, women do lie and obfuscate in sex-studies. I might have been a bit too rash. But that is mostly because “women lie and obfuscate” is often used as a catch-all refutation of the sexual drive-thesis, in a way that’s not really true. Even if women do lie and obfuscate quite a fair bit, it’s not enough to explain the whole difference. One fake lie detector test doesn’t change that.
Men crave female validation and companionship, as your link shows, but I think it’s important to remember that when we talk about sex like we do here, we are also talking about sex-as-proxy for female validation and companionship. I mean, it’s fairly obvious quite a few men use sex as an excuse for intimacy.
Now, I also readily admit that the mechanics that create the skewed relationship-market are a bit more complicated than women just having a lower libido – but accepting that they do is still of monumental importance. But I can describe some other potential factors, too.
One part of the mechanics, I think, is that women are more choosy when it comes to men’s looks; OkCupid “study” shows that they rate 80% of guys looks as below average. Men’s ratings, on the other hand, are almost normalized when shown on a graph.
A small paper, this time by Bo Rothstein in Sweden (in swedish, catch, available for download here: http://www.rothstein.dinstudio.se/files/De_dubbelt_ratade_2.pdf), named “De dubbelt ratade” (“The twice outcast”), illustrates another important factor. Namely, money and status.
From page 2 of the paper: “En titt i statistiken ger t ex följande. För män mellan 25 och 45 och som har ett akademiskt yrke är sannolikheten för att leva i ett hushåll med barn omkring 73 procent men för män med ett LO-yrke sjunker detta till 50 procent och för män som är arbetslösa eller långtidssjukskrivna sjunker siffran till 23 procent. För kvinnor i denna åldersgrupp saknar emellertid ställning på arbetsmarknaden helt koppling till sannolikheten att leva med barn – den är konstant omkring 75 procent.”
Rough translation: “A look through the statistics for example, shows the following. For men between 25 and 45 years of age with a high-status [akademiskt, literally “academic”] job, the probablility of living in a household with children is 73 percent, but for men with a low/low-medium [literally “with an LO-profession”. LO is a large swedish union for traditionally lower-class workers] job, it’s 50 percent, and for men who are unemployed or on long term sick-leave [I.E, on welfare], the number drops to 23 percent. However, for women in this age group, position on the labour market is completely detached from the probability of living with children – it is constant, at about 75 percent.”
This (along with the rest of the paper, selected portions of which I can translate if anyone expresses interest) is fairly solid evidence that status/money (the two often go hand in hand) are important factors in a man’s romantic success. Also, keep in mind these numbers are from Sweden, a country leading in equality. Other countries statisticts are not going to be better.
Overall, I think these sources paint a picture quite somber:
– women are less sexually interested than men
– they are also more stingy when it comes to looks, i.e on of the most relevant criteria for one night stands or fuck-buddy relationships
– when it comes to long-term relationships (which are most likely to produce children), they place significant weight on the money/status of a prospective mate
If we keep all this in mind and try to come up with an explanation, I think we can come very close to the truth. To paraphrase what I think is happening:
An increasing number of men are becoming more and more romantically and sexually frustrated.
This is because women are 1) less sexually driven and 2) more stingy when it comes to looks. The rise of apps such as Tinder, and in the wider sense of the word globalisation, makes sure there is always at least one attractive guy in the vicinity, with which an average woman can hook up. This means the uglier guys are out of luck, and indeed, the amount of men, nerds or otherwise, who are missing out on sex for much of their adolescent and youth seems (anecdotally) to be on the rise.
Finding a long-term romantic interest is also getting harder for both genders, since women are becoming more independent and earning more money, which in turn lowers the amount of potential partners. The average woman wants a man with higher status and more money than her, remember?
All of this is not to say that women have some sort of moral responsibility to lower their standards and fuck trollfaces. The solution – if one exists – will need to make both genders happy, not throw one of them under the bus. And that’s where I’m concerned, because a not insignificant portion of modern day feminist substance regarding sex and relationship, seems to a best ignore the plight of the sexually frustrated men, and at worst ridicule them as some sort of entitlement-simmering gnomepeople that live under bridges and whose romantic failure have tainted their entire being.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
The issue is that masculinity for men includes stoicism, figuring things out on your own, etc. So when you say that men are not doing the things that women do to weather adversity, you are ignoring that men get punished for this by societal disapproval (including by romantic prospects).
Secondly, women often cope by demanding benevolent sexism from men or the state (whose taxes & spending are a substantial wealth redistribution from men to women, so also a form of benevolent sexism), which is a strategy that is mostly asymmetric (as it is based on a societial norm that men have to help women in need) and thus cannot just be copied by men.
I want people to stop with the myths that men can do everything that women can do and much more. I want people to recognize the sacrifices that men make for others and treat them as they would the sacrifices that women make, rather than taking them for granted and merely getting angry at situations where women sacrifice for men. I want women to learn that their sexuality is not harmless. I want people to do research into how each gender is harmed, rather than assuming that men aren’t and excluding them from study. I want people to not attack men when they open up about their issues and the harm being done to them. Etc, etc.
Men are/were shamed into changing their gender expression and sexual attractions. It’s not OK to approach women in certain ways. It’s not OK to demand that a partner do the cooking and the housework. It’s not OK to ask a female partner to work less. It’s not OK to put a picture of a naked woman up on the wall at work.
This is what mainstream feminism has pushed and what has seeped into society. Yet now it’s suddenly wrong to demand something similar from women? That is a double standard.
Sometimes I get the not so vague sense that you assume bad faith when interacting with me. The manipulation is already happening, but for women’s benefits.
It is immoral to maximize your own life satisfaction! The moral choice is to accept a limited life satisfaction when doing otherwise would cause substantial harm to others. I presume that you misspoke here and are not defending women who abuse men when this benefits them and they have the power to do so.
I’m not asking for advice, nor demanding that women flock to me. What I ask is that the same utilitarian standards are applied to each gender, so male and female happiness is valued equally.
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veronica d said:
Both men and women face unfair beauty standards. For example, both short men and bald men earn less on average than, respectively, tall men and men with full heads of hair. However, when men complain about the beauty standards they face, at least when they emphatically complain, it is seldom about differences in salary. Instead, it is about the romantic and sexual choices that women make. Men (some men) get very upset when women choose to be intimate with men who are not them.
Women also complain about beauty standards, but their complaints tend to be rather different. It is not that women never complain about their romantic prospects. (Single mothers, for example, often complain about their difficulties in the dating market.) Instead, much of women’s talk of beauty standards is a general complaint about how we are objectified and how this affects our career prospects.
You can gain much insight by examining this asymmetry.
As feminism has advanced, there is a trend where we have desexualized the workplace. This is not perfect, of course. Humans are humans. Sexual psychology doesn’t just go away because we wish it away. That said, indeed you cannot hang nudie picture in the workplace anymore. You are expected to be “professional,” which means keeping sexuality at a low simmer while at work.
I have to do this just as a man does. For example, one of my coworkers happens to also be one of my BDSM play partners. Another coworker is a former sexual partner.
Our employee handbook has specific rules on romantic and sexual relations between employees. It turns out we are in compliance, which is convenient. But mostly, we just don’t talk about it at work. It has no place there. It is an “outside of work” issue.
Outside of work, you are free to explore your sexuality as you see fit. If you want to experiment with BDSM, you may do so. If you want to be a swinger, that’s okay. If you want a traditional relationship based on Christian principles, then by all means enjoy. I will have no role in your Christian marriage, just as you’ll have none in my queer kinky adventures. But neither of us can constrain the choices of the other. If a man wants a woman who does the housework, as long as he finds a woman who wants that also, then no one else can stop them.
All this assumes you respect consent. Consent is the big deal that ties this together.
This basically is liberalism. We’ve worked hard to get here.
#####
Of course I’m going to want to maximize my own happiness. This is not about being a sociopath. I’m a person with empathy, who forms close bonds with other people. I support them. They support me. I have values, which balance their values. I practice virtues. I enjoy the virtues of my friends. Most people do similarly. That said, you cannot demand I enter into an abusive relationship just because some random man is lonely. You cannot demand that I submit to some controlling asshole. And I assure you, “nice guys” frequently turn out to be controlling assholes. Women are smart. There is a reason insecurity turns us off. We can smell the desperation. Plus, we have experience. Some random dipship who freaks out about the “friendzone” would not have handled the challenges of a sexual relationship with any more grace. Most women have dealt with that guy.
(I on the other hand was that guy. We trans gals walk an interesting path.)
Plus, sometimes we just want a hawt fuck from someone who looks good and knows how. I have zero confidence that the members of the “manosphere” will have my best interest in mind when selecting my partners. I’ll select them myself, thank you very much.
A man has precisely the same sexual rights as I do. Of course, if nobody wants him…
If nobody wants me…
Regarding my duties to a liberal society, I work. I pay my taxes. I vote. I’ve done jury duty. I’ve volunteered. I am engaged in my community. I believe in civility, and try to act civil in my day to day. Furthermore, I recognize privilege. We certainly should work for greater equity. However, it is one thing to expect me to share a lunch counter with a black person, or to show greater consciousness of how my language can affect disadvantaged people, or how my viewpoint is shaped by my whiteness, etc. These are all fair points. That said, it is quite something else to expect me to submit to an immature, insecure, sexually preoccupied man for whom I feel zero attraction. Sorry no. That is no longer an aspect of privilege, but instead sexual slavery.
I feel bad for lonely, socially isolated people. I have some friends who are thus. I try to include them in social activities, to some degree. A few of these people are weird, neurodiverse men who like problematic anime. (I share their love of problematic anime.) That said, I don’t exist for them. I decide how much to give based on my own interests. Furthermore, when it comes to romance and sexuality, this is my deepest self, my most exposed. This is intimacy, psychologically raw. It does not belong to them, nor to you, nor to anyone except me.
#####
Men derive a great deal of status according to their access to sexual partners. This seems a foolish currency, inasmuch as it regards women as status markers, but in practice it gives women the power of status arbiters. This is a pretty shitty deal for women. While we mainly want to find cool people with whom to have cool relationships, we in turn have to deal with the hellscape of male insecurity as we get blamed for the full measure of any random man’s failure.
After all, tfw no girlfriend equals failed man.
This is not our fault. Women never asked for this power. It emerged from sexual pursuit culture.
Feminist have written a great deal about how terrible sexual pursuit culture is. That said, if I want a hookup some Tuesday night, Tinder is rather convenient, even if it is terrible. (Grindr is worse.)
(I don’t actually use Tinder, as a matter of fact, nor Grindr. I mostly hookup on the trans parts of Facebook. But all the same.)
Sexual pursuit culture isn’t going away anytime soon. People like it. They get laid. That said, we should stop judging men according to the number of sexual partners they’ve had. It’s a silly metric that masks the host of other qualities.
Women play some role in this, but honestly, we mostly get drafted into the shitty “status arbiter” role and less as full players in the male pecking order. In other words, men have largely done this to other men. Women have limited power in this frame, but men imagine we have much power. That is the core problem. Thus your demands that women fix this simply compound the irrationality and injustice.
We cannot. To try is only to dig ourselves deeper into male dysfunction, because men assign a value to our choice that we cannot control. We are not responsible for your status games.
Instead, we love, fuck, and date according to our best interests, while looking on with amusement at the silly games that men play.
Sorry, not sorry.
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veronica d said:
@Johannes — It seems important to note that, in that OkC data, while women indeed downrated male attractiveness, they were also far more willing to send messages to average men. By contrast, men indeed gave more balanced ratings, but then basically ignored the average women and put all their attention on the 4’s and 5’s. Women would initiate conversations with the 2’s.
The reply rates, on the other hand, favored women. Below average women were more likely to get replies than below average men. But still, the differences were not extreme.
OkC, of course, cannot measure who got laid.
Anyhow, people reference that article a lot, but only the one statistic, while ignoring the rest. I wonder why.
This link works: https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e
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Johannes said:
@veronica d
What you are saying about women’s willingness to send messages is true. I don’t think it quite refutes my point about stinginess, though.
For one thing, OkC-women might be looking for a long-term relationship, in which case they might well be willing to trade worse looks for higher status or money or personality. When it comes to ONS and fuck-buddy relationships, I’m willing to bet the less attractive guys end up significantly hampered.
And regardless, the point still stands – women rate 80% of men as below average. This in itself is depressing, even if women are willing to overlook their preferences somewhat.
Also, thanks for providing a working link! I tried to be fancy and imbed it, but I’m not so good with WordPress comments.
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Aapje said:
@Veronica d
It’s pretty obvious why men complain about women disliking baldness or short men and not about the salary difference. The latter is merely a correlation, which may have many reasons, including both being causes by confounders (there is some evidence that poverty correlates to baldness and poor nutrition obviously causes shortness; and poverty during one’s youth correlates to poverty as an adult). In contrast, it seems very common for women to explicitly state a height preference, so then it’s pretty easy to determine a direct cause and effect. Furthermore, it’s obviously a lot more frustrating to be shut out (nearly) entirely than to get a bit less. If short men would have far higher rates of unemployment, I’d think that they would complain a lot more.
As for desexualization of the workplace, this is more true for men than women. Women can (and sometimes must) show leg, while men are generally not allowed to do so (there have been several cases where men protested against having to wear long pants in hot weather by wearing a skirt). The most racy comments I’ve heard in the workplace were by women. They seem to feel that they can get away with more, probably correctly (there are written and unwritten rules, which can differ).
As for your fantasy that I want you to enter into abusive relationships, that I want to select your partners for you, etc; this is highly insulting and incorrect. Nothing I said can reasonably be interpreted this way, IMO. Also, you are a lesbian, which makes your fantasy that I want to hook you up with male partners even more absurd.
It may be foolish, but the status hierarchy is not a choice by an individual man. It’s the culture which determines what gives status. Secondly, it also gives women many advantages. It’s basic negotiation theory that the (known) desperate party has a worse bargaining position.
Men and women perpetuate this dating & relationship norms, partly on purpose and partly because they don’t know the full consequences. Like you, with your denial that women have great power here. The damsel in distress act is getting old. Feminism has traded on it for ages and as the movement has gotten its way, the discrepancy between the narrative and reality is becoming bigger and (thus) clearer.
That’s not what I demanded. You keep not reading what I state and make up things instead. I merely ask that women take responsibility for their part in this mess, no more, no less.
Just like men are not responsible for ‘female’ status games, like slut shaming…yeah, that’s what I thought. Heads, men are to blame, tails, men are to blame.
You have conspicuously refused to respond to my objection that your stated morals legitimize harming others for your own benefit. I guess that this harm is supposed to not happen due to your claim that individual women have no power to change the system, while individual men somehow do. This fails to address the obvious truth that you can still harm an individual and your stated morals legitimize causing any amount of harm to others for any amount of personal benefit.
This is an evil philosophy, Veronica. I hope that you are just bad at expressing your true morals.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
You are misrepresenting the OK Cupid article. Men send about as the same percentage of their messages to the average woman as the percentage of women that they rate as average. They send a lot more messages to the best looking women and far fewer messages to less than average women, but the average women are treated extremely fairly.
And a major reason why women send relatively more messages to 2’s is because they rate men very harshly. They send almost no messages to 5’s, but they also seem to rate ~0% of men as 5’s. It’s hard to send messages to non-existing people.
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veronica d said:
I invite people to read the OkC article themselves and draw their own conclusions.
Speaking for myself, I’m bisexual, not lesbian, although my behavior is female-exclusive. The reason for this is simple: the few times I’ve opened my dating profiles to men — well I was disappointed. I received queries, a fair number. However, not a single query was from a man I had even remote interest in. My experiences at bars and clubs is similar. Occasionally some man will try to pick me up on the subway or some other public place. However, it is never an even remotely attractive man, not even close. (One time cargo shorts were involved. Can you even imagine.)
The logical result of high standards is missed experience. I’ve made my choice.
Honestly, I do think the average woman is more attractive than the average man. However, I don’t think this is necessarily unfair. After all, women have traditionally invested far more effort into looking good than what men invest. From that work, it is unsurprising that we get the payoff of looking good.
Note this is not merely the effort spent applying makeup or doing our hair. It is also the learning required to make good decisions about makeup and hair, about clothes, about style. It is about looking in the mirror with an editorial eye. Likewise, it is about selecting camera angles and photographs with an editorial eye.
(In the OkC article, the photos of the “below average” men are — well, those guys probably should not have chosen those photographs to represent themselves.)
In other words, those OkC numbers might simply reflect reality.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This is a side point and I feel like I possibly bring it up too often, but I really don’t think that looks are necessarily the main factor for a woman deciding whether to hook up with someone. Personality is super important – you have to find someone who you can trust to respect your boundaries (I think this is on average more important for women than men because of the physical strength thing, plus possibly women might be more likely to have restrictive boundaries to begin with) and who will care about your comfort and enjoyment (this too is asymmetrical in part because of the dominant cultural script about what sex *is*, and also because women are more likely to primarily experience responsive desire). And the responsive desire thing means looks may be less important anyway.
(Of course these things are harder to determine from an online dating profile than looks, so women who are theoretically interested in hooking up with people may not actually do so because they’re worried about not being able to screen people by personality. I do think this is a thing.)
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veronica d said:
If I look at my friends circle, rating how attractive I find the women versus the men, yeah, I think plenty of women value personality and character over looks. That said, online dating definitely skews toward a “looks are everything” value system.
Make sure your photos are the best you get.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
Women have a greater tendency to take that ‘editorial eye’ very far, in way that many men find deceiving. As usual, you take the common female strategy and ignore the downsides and ignore the upsides of the male strategy.
That people are generally stupid and can’t easily look beyond ‘dress up’? Possibly, although the top rated images for both men and women from the article are truly shite. Bad lighting, bad clothes, bad location, etc. The only thing that 3/4 do right is show the most attractive emotion for their gender, which is no emotion for the men and smiling for the women. Bottom left woman fails there too. The top left and bottom right images of the people rated in the middle are much better at showing these people in (also literally) the best possible light.
You may overestimate how much ugliness people can compensate for, especially men, who have fewer socially acceptable options (make up is generally not allowed, for example).
@tcheasdfjkl
It seems to me that men have to be close to that boundary (and perhaps a little over it) to be sexually exciting, which is what makes dating quite hard for men. They need to walk that tightrope between exciting and creep.
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veronica d said:
Oh good grief.
Look, beauty is self-justifying. Aesthetics is not a chore. Instead, it is a delight.
I love makeup. I love looking in the mirror and seeing someone attractive looking back. And indeed, much of this is about choosing clothes that flatter me, choosing a hairstyle that works with my skin tone and face. It involves skincare. It involves many things (including from what angle I shoot my selfies).
Is the payoff worth it?
Fuck yeah it is.
For the OkC data, we see a notable difference in skew [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skewness]. So why? Are women more judgemental? Is this unfair?
Well, if you have two populations engaged in an activity, and if one population invests more effort into getting good at that activity, then then we should not be surprised that this group outperforms the other group. In the case of beauty, of course, there are some genetically lucky people who will score well no matter what. For others, much effort will lead to much payoff. (And then there are those on the far left, where effort won’t matter much, because nature is cruel.)
So anyway, my point: if meeting the standards of masculine versus feminine beauty each require similar gifts and similar effort, and if women put in more effort, then you would expect something much like what the OkC team observed.
Is this what is happening? I don’t know. Obviously this is not an objective measure, inasmuch as women and men are playing different games. But we knew that already. My point: this data does not show that women are unfair. This could be an entirely valid reflection of male versus female beauty. We don’t know.
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NN said:
Regarding the OK Cupid data, all of the discussion about how much better women have it and how much of an injustice that is seems a little academic when you look at this graph. This one shows that if one of the least attractive men messages a woman of “medium” attractiveness, he will get a reply roughly 25% of the time. It doesn’t give any data on how many conversations lead to dates, but let’s be conservative and say that ~20% of replies lead to a date. That would mean that if a “least attractive” man messaged just 1 “medium attractiveness” women per day, he’d get a date in an average of 3 weeks.
Yes, this is still worse than women have it since a woman is far less likely to be rated as “least attractive,” but it doesn’t exactly paint a picture of existential despair and inevitable Forever Aloneness for men. Reading this makes me think that a lot of the bad experiences that men report having in online dating (Disclaimer: I’ve never tried online dating myself, so I’m just going off of other people’s anecdotes for this) are due to them focusing on the most attractive women, and that, like Ozy suggests here, the incel phenomenon is more due to shyness than anything else.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
You get to have your own preferences. You don’t get to decide for other people what their real preferences are, especially when they don’t do what you think they should enjoy doing.
Some men and women enjoy putting a lot of effort into looking beautiful, many don’t. The women that don’t, get pushed by our culture into making that effort even if they prefer not to. The men that like to dress up have strict limits in most situations, which some flee by cross-dressing. In other ways, the norms are for men to do things that they don’t necessarily enjoy (but some do), like earning a decent amount of money. These gender-dependent norms are sexist. They are also oppressive, by requiring people to follow a norm. These are semi-orthogonal issues. You can have gender-neutral oppressive norms and sexist oppressive norms and gender neutral laissez-faire norms.
Then you have the meta level, where willingness to signal in socially normative ways is itself a signal that a person is willing to be social and adapt to others. So even people who don’t care about looks or money can use the norms to distinguish those who are socially adept and/or not that selfish. So people may not be willing to just give up this benefit even if they don’t care much about the the behavior that the norms enforce.
It’s very hard to have a productive discussion with you about this though, because you seem to be unable to look beyond your own preferences. I’ve found this to be a consistent theme in your writing here. It always seems to boil down to building a framework in which you can do what you want and as I reject egoistic hedonism for its indifference to the impact of actions on others, I find this immoral.
I think that a more accurate statement is that male attractiveness is less about beauty than female attractiveness, so men optimize their attractiveness in ways that can’t be judged by looking at a picture. If OK Cupid would do a similar analysis for income, they might see a gendered result as well.
Nobody in this thread claimed that women were unfair. You keep coming up with these straw men where women are supposedly being asked to completely ignore their preferences and act as free prostitutes by the ‘manosphere’ and it’s pretty tiring by now.
What people are actually pointing out is that there is a double standard in feminist discourse where it is absolutely fine to want to suppress male preferences and/or female gender norms that benefit men, but it is considered misogynist to even want to debate female preferences and male gender norms that benefit women. The desire to debate female preferences and male gender norms that benefit women is treated as a demand to change these in a way that is completely unfair to women. It’s this assumption of bad faith that poisons these debates and which has turned most of feminism into an echo chamber where only a very biased view is considered acceptable.
My position is that if men are asked to partially suppress their preferences and/or if we get rid of some female gender norms that benefit men; then women should also be asked to partially suppress their preferences and/or we should get rid of some female gender norms that benefit men. Quid pro quo, nothing more, nothing less. How is that not fair?
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veronica d said:
I’m all for removing oppressive gender norms.
The thing is, you remind me of a second wave radfem. They wanted sooo much for femininity and masculinity to just disappear, but it would not. They pushed so hard, and in fact they pushed harder on women than men, inasmuch as more women were willing to listen to them. But it did not work. Women (most women) remained feminine.
We should be more open to gender-non-conforming people. Obviously.
Gender-non-conformity is totally not what I am talking about. Most people are relatively gender normative.
Back to the OkC data. The thing is, it is true. In fact, I think it shows a persistent social trend, at least among white middle-class Americans. (I have no idea if it is universal. How does gender work in Papua New Guinea? How did sexual attraction distribute among the steppe nomads? Etc.)
My point is, I think it worked roughly this way for my parents generation. However, back then women were strongly pressured into marriage, with some man, any man.
So they did. Thus many women ended up married to a man for whom they felt no sexual attraction.
And they made their lives work. But these women (many women) were sexual beings, passionate women, beautiful women. They were constrained, stilted, oppressed. It seems that many sublimated their passions into motherhood and homemaking, etc. But still, what an incomplete life.
Have you noticed no one suffers from “hysteria” anymore?
Instead everyone these days is a narcissist.
#####
The median man holds pretty much zero sex appeal for a broad cross section of women.
This is not total. Women are not a hive mind. Plus, men can have other virtues that attract women. But all the same, sex and passion matter a lot. This is a brutal fact. The numbers suck for the median man.
They suck more for the far-below-median men.
They also suck for women. We do not choose our attraction. We like what we like, in a visceral way. Thus women are figuring out how to be satisfied with a select group of men.
It is great for those men. Women ask them out.
It is also pretty great for women with non-standard attractions. If you are a woman into (for example) short dudes, you will have plenty of high quality options.
“But women can lower their standards”
— which means —
“How can you say you’re hungry when there is a hot dog lying on the ground outside?”
Sorry.
#####
Women in my generation thought they could have it all. They could not. Women today have adjusted. We want passion. We want fulfillment. We want many things. But there are tradeoffs to juggle. We juggle them.
Serial monogamy works for some. Polygamy works for others. There are many choices.
— including walking away from the whole mess. After all, we gals cannot really fake desire, not easily. Some women can, of course. (Some) sex workers do. But it is not a reasonable request for an average woman. Honestly, it is gross, viscerally repulsive.
A nice cat, a good book, a glass of wine, a warm hitachi — honestly, it ain’t a bad evening. On Friday you can go out with your friends.
One does not descend into bitterness and hate.
Of course, some women do.
#####
“Oh you’re such a sweet guy! I can’t believe you don’t have a girlfriend! What? Oh, you mean me? Oh honey, we’re such good friends. I wouldn’t want to ruin that. Plus, you know, you’re just not my type.”
She means well. Honestly, the young women who say this stuff don’t mean to be cruel. However, I suspect that most women, at least by the time we reach our thirties, are done with that shit.
There is a reason older women shy away from “nice guys.” We cannot really help them. What they want from us, we cannot give.
I mean, we could fall back, close our eyes, and try hard to imagine some other man, while our “nice guy” friend thrusts into us.
Obviously that doesn’t work.
#####
Of course this is about power and control. My mother is still alive. The experiences of women like her remain living memory. Men remember also. They know they have lost something.
They feel directly the loss of a nurturing women. They (many of them) do not understand how much power, dominance, and control was involved in getting that.
Most men are not part of the “manosphere,” but the “manosphere” reveals the frustrations of many men.
“He says what everyone else is thinking.”
#####
The roles that women can play in this are shaped by the insecurities and desires of men. We are symbols of their masculine success or failure. It is quite challenging enough for women to navigate that. To also take responsibility for the feelings of men who resent us because we do not desire them — nope.
#####
Women have changed a lot. Men must change also. They must adjust.
Our attractions will not change. They are visceral, organic, deeply felt. We want lives of passion.
For men —
Know the score. Pick a strategy.
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Aapje said:
@Veronica d
I’m not arguing for the dissolution of gender. I merely ask that we reduce the gendered pressures, expectations, etc on men roughly as much as we do for women, pressure them equally for things we want people to do (like better sexual mores), give them roughly equal amounts of support where they need it, etc.
As for your second point, men were strongly pressured to marry as well, had limited options, etc. For most of post-barbarian history, men would work the land next to their home and women would work the home next to their land (and vice versa, but less so). Very constrained for both genders. This myth that men had all options and women were kept at home is at most semi-accurate for a brief period in history, for some classes in society. It’s the feminist antipode to the conservative ‘everything was better in the 50’s’ myth.
I think that the current trend is just to be depressed. Last time I checked, loads of people are.
It’s difficult to argue with you when you make a point and immediately make the opposite claim. I don’t know how to argue with this (same problem that Hillary had?!).
Bitter women exist, bitter men exist. You don’t care for the latter. You want society to help the former. Accurate?
The roles that men can play in this are shaped by the insecurities and desires of women. That is also true. So what now?
Men have changed a lot. Many of the things that feminists blame on men not changing are provably caused by women’s choices, other issues are caused by both genders keeping each other in a deadlock and very little is purely caused by men. But everything must and shall be blamed on men, facts be damned.
Many men have the same unhealthy desire. They call it the midlife crisis when men start to realize how unrealistic this is.
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arbitrary_greay said:
This entire thread has been fascinating to read right after taking in this Tumblr post: https://simonpenner.tumblr.com/post/162719487801/feeling-is-not-being-being-is-not-feeling
Because it seems that this thread is a gender-reversed situation. tl;dr that post talks about how some of the sexism that women perceive in the workplace is actually extended equality in how men treat each other.
In this thread, it seems like some of the unfairness that men perceive in the dating scene is actually extended equality in what women expect from each other.
Or reversed, women expect that men in the workplace treat them the way women treat each other, while men expect that women in the dating scene have the standards that men hold for other men.
Or crossing platonic/romantic, women are expecting the same kind of social skills from men in the platonic workplace that they get/got from men who meet their romantic standards, while men are expecting the same kind of romantic social rules as the platonic standards they have with other men.
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Aapje said:
@arbitrary_greay
I’m rather confused, because your summary for the Tumblr post doesn’t match my reading and your view on this thread doesn’t match my perception either. The Tumblr post is not arguing that women want to be treated by men the same way that other women treat them*, nor how men treat men, but instead, with benevolent sexism/chivalry.
Men who use the common female strategy in dating have a name: ‘nice guys.’ Feminists usually don’t look kindly on them. Instead, the general demand is that men use the male strategy, but perfectly, where they only approach women who want to be approached at that time and in that place, with enough sexual aggression so it is a clear approach, but not too much. A common complaint by men is that this standard requires mind reading ability, as different women have different standards & sensitivity to sexual aggression.
The usual responses to women being asked to initiate more are ‘but I get bad reactions because people are used to the classic gender roles’ and ‘it doesn’t work out very often’ which is considered a sufficient reason for women not to do so. The latter shows a lack of empathy with the male gender role, because many men have very low success rates when they initiate, so if women use this reason it often comes across as: ‘I don’t want to share the burdens of dating and want men to suffer rejection, so I don’t have to’. In general, these reasons are common rebuttals by men to feminist demands. Yet then these arguments are not accepted. Hence I can only conclude that most feminists have double standards, where they are very tolerant of bad outcomes for men, but extremely intolerant of bad outcomes for women.
I think that as we live in an imperfect world, a certain number of bad outcomes are inevitable. My morality involves minimizing this for all of humanity and somewhat fairly balancing it for the genders. I object to those that claim to be in favor of equality, but want to make life better for women, while looking away when men have problems or worse, who are willing to make men suffer for the benefit of women.
* Women very often don’t treat women very nicely and I know women who prefer to work with men for this reason.
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veronica d said:
That is not what “nice guy” is. The “nice guy” thing has to do with resentment, insecurity, entitlement, and bitterness. One can pursue various “strategies” and still be a nice guy.
As a basic example, a guy can put on his polo shirt, head out to the club, approach women, buy them drinks, try his “lines,” etc., and still be a total nice guy as he gets shot down. Imagine, for example, if he approaches a woman, waves to her, gets her attention, offers a drink, she accepts, he buys, she sips, he tries to chat, she gives a cold shoulder, and then (OMG!) a cute dude with emo hair comes up to the bar. The woman notices emo-dude. She turns to him, opens her body language, smiles. The emo-dude chats her up. She rocks her shoulders. He drops a silly “neg.” She laughs, all the while drinking the drink that polo-shirt-guy bought.
Polo-shirt-guy fumes. He leaves the bar, charges home, fires up Reddit, and pounds out a rant about how unfair women are.
He’s a fucking “nice guy.” He’s tedious as fuck and women are sick of him.
#####
Women don’t “demand” that men use any dating strategy. In fact, that is an entirely broken way to view these things. It is deeply ugly and reveals bad things about how you view women and romance.
Personally, I expect men to be civil, just as women should be. I prefer when men show good social calibration, although working in tech I have moderate expectations in that area. But “demand” — get over yourself.
You’ll do better if you view this less in terms of demands or expectation and more in terms of desires and attractions. Most women are feminine and attracted to masculine men. Most men are masculine and attracted to feminine women. There is much variation on both sides. If you view all of this as demands or challenges or “shit tests” or any similar thing, then you’ll fall straight into the transactional view of sex and romance. From transactions come debts. From debts come demands. But this is all in your head. She didn’t sign a contract when you bought her a drink.
Who is making demands? The woman minding her own business, trying to have fun, only maybe finding some guy she likes? Or the dude who wants something from her and then gets upset when he cannot get it.
Honestly, if some guy goes home lonely, that’s sad for him, but not my problem. The current situation is imperfect, but the fact that some people don’t get sex is not a crisis for others. You are not owed sex.
Women are not owed free drinks either. Men are not owed “a shot.” Round and round we go.
Who is actually making demands?
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arbitrary_greay said:
@Aapje:
“this standard requires mind reading ability”
No, this is an expectation of having emotional sensitivity, social skills, which mostly entails the ability to observe people’s behaviors and how that links to their emotions, and what external factors like other people’s behaviors influences those things, and move within those systems of relationship dynamics.
These are skills that women have been socialized to prioritize. All that discourse over emotional labor and such.
Think of classic romantic fantasy guy. Also relevant and also Hugh Jackman as ideal romantic fantasy.
Therefore, we have a reversal across dynamics:
Men are extending equality of masculine platonic social dynamics to women in the workplace, a rejection of chivalrously favoring the lady.
Women are extending equality of feminine social skill expectations to men within romantic relationships, a rejection of “boys will be boys.”
If women should take perceived slights in the workplace within context as equality, then men should take perceived standards in dating within context as equality. Or, if men should accommodate feminine platonic social dynamics within the workplace for equality, then women should accommodate masculine social skill standards in dating for equality.
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Aapje said:
@veronica d
Many men who try the female strategy get bitter, resentful, upset, etc due to it not working for them (and frequently because they were explicitly steered to this strategy). A subset of women don’t have the attributes to pull off the female strategy too. They also tend to get bitter, resentful, upset, etc. The former group gets treated as if they intentionally seek to deceive/hurt women, where their negative emotions are used as proof that they never had good intentions in the first place. The latter group gets sympathy. SJ people tend to argue that the ‘oppressed’ have a right to be angry, while the ‘oppressors’ do not. So this double standard is explicitly defended, where bad behavior by women is treated as a logical outcome of having bad patriarchal experiences and not a reflection of their character, but men who have bad experiences are considered to be inherently evil if they are not stoic. This is an example of how feminism often reinforces gender roles/stereotypes. Note that this reasoning is in direct conflict with ‘patriarchy hurts men too’ (which should legitimize male anger by the same reasoning used to defend female anger), as well as the claim that men should show more emotions.
Social Justice argumentation often uses different kinds of arguments in different circumstances, where object level arguments reinforce the male gender role & harm male interests, while meta level arguments tend to involve gender role critical, pro-male arguments. Of course, since actual policy is made on the object level, the end result tends to be that feminism fights against the interests of men, while the high level debate is very different.
—
Your equivocation of PUAs who approach women in a bar with ‘nice guys’ is absurd. That’s the opposite of what the term means. You inadvertently demonstrate a greater truth, though. Social Justice terminology is so deceptive that many people just assume that their subjective interpretation is the right one, resulting in 1001 different interpretations. Not infrequently, the interpretation by one person is the opposite to an interpretation by another person.
Many women design their dating strategy around (semi-)passivity, which automatically results in an environment where pro-active men are far more successful.
In the past, the milk man would come by people’s houses, selling door to door. This changed where the milk is now sold in stores, where people have to go to the salesperson instead of the salesperson to them. If they don’t use this strategy, they end up with no milk, unless they go to a lot of extra effort (by caring for their own cow(s), for example). The salesperson doesn’t literally demand that you go to the store, but people who have a desire for milk somehow all ends up doing this due to how society is designed/operates.
So are you denying that gender roles exist where men and women are pushed into using specific strategies, are pushed to have certain desires and attractions, etc? Why do you call yourself a feminist if you don’t want to address these gender norms and just expect people to adapt to them?
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Aapje said:
@arbitrary_greay
It is fantasy to think that all people who send signals do so intentionally and that all senders & receivers can be calibrated equally. Because society is so large and people are diverse, you get all kinds of groups with different calibrations, as well as differences for each individual. So perfect calibration is impossible. If we punish men for making mistakes in interpreting signals, then men will inevitably get punished quite often. I regularly see people defend punishing men, but rarely a recognition that:
– men aren’t born perfect and learning involves making mistakes
– punishment can be far worse than the initial crime, so defending punishment without bounding it is like defending self-defense without requiring proportionality
– punishment will disproportionality be applied to certain (usually already marginalized) groups
– it’s sexist to punish men for sending & interpreting signals differently from how they were meant, but not punish women for similar mistakes
Emotional sensitivity is a skill that involves both innate ability and training. Some people lack the former. Many people can function fairly well in relationships even with limited emotional sensitivity & social skills by adopting other strategies (like talking to each other). If we are to be a truly inclusive society, should there not be a recognition that one strategy can’t work for everyone? Is it any fairer to demand that mentally limited people fit an exact dating mold than to deny a driver’s license to paraplegics, rather than granting them a license if they can prove they can drive safely with hand controls?
Sure, but it’s also far safer to calibrate ‘passive’ sending than receiving. For example, imagine this scenario:
1. Alice notices Bob and wants to date him
2. Alice looks in his direction and waits a bit, Bob doesn’t respond
3. Alice changes her stance and waits a bit, Bob doesn’t respond
4. Alice flicks her hair while looking in his direction and waits a bit, Bob comes over and he gets a positive response
In this scenario Alice sent insufficient signals twice, but could simply keep escalating until he responded. So she knew exactly at what point Bob was triggered. Now look at it from Bob’s position, he knows for sure that the hair-flick was a signal of interest, but even if he noticed the behavior from 2 and 3, he can’t be sure that this was part of the attempt to get him to come over or whether Alice was still deciding at this point. To figure this out, he needs to approach other women who do the behavior from 2 and 3, risking disapproval/punishment.
In actual reality, some women only use 4 and up as a signal of interest, while others use 2 and up or 3 and up. Some women may do the same behavior without meaning to send a signal on some occasions, while doing the same behavior at other times while meaning to send a signal. The end result is that perfect calibration is impossible.
Now imagine a failure scenario for the classic female gender role:
1. Alice notices Bob and wants to date him
2. Alice looks in his direction and waits a bit, Bob doesn’t respond
3. Alice changes her stance and waits a bit, Bob doesn’t respond
4. Alice assumes Bob isn’t interested, even though he is, but didn’t notice or didn’t interpret the signal as a sufficiently strong signal of interest
This results in frustration and a missed opportunity, but no negative social interaction. The missed opportunities can themselves cause psychological harm, so this is not a harmless failure mode.
Now imagine another failure scenario for the classic female gender role:
1. Alice notices Bob and wants to date him
2, 3, 4, 5: she sends all kinds of signals, Bob doesn’t respond
6. Alice starts feeling Bob up to send a really strong signal, Bob turns her down
The social standard is that Bob is not allowed to be mean here. He must kindly turn her down. However, if we reverse the scenario, the social standard is that Alice is legitimized in putting Bob in his place, using strong language or even violence (slapping him or demanding violence from other men).
So there is substantial inequality here in how society deals with these failure modes.
It seems to me that society is now partially trying to force men into the feminine social dynamics and partially trying to force women into the male social dynamics. My complaint is people tend to be unwilling to give up benefits for women that are the result of the male gender role, even if men are pressured into producing these benefits and when there are significant negative consequences to men due to this. In contrast, people are very willing to end the benefits to men that are the result of the female gender role, recognizing the downsides to women and the pressure on women.
Male outcomes that are (perceived as) positive are often a package deal that also involve negative consequences, but this is not recognized, resulting in a demand that women also get those positive outcomes, but without a willingness to let women have the linked negative consequences. This can sometimes be achieved somewhat by discrimination of men to offload these negative consequences on them, but often is simply impossible. Hence the failure to get equal pay, to fix dating, to breech the glass ceiling, etc, etc.
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veronica d said:
That’s all fine, but we’re still not going to sleep with men for whom we feel no attraction. Nor are we telling men to follow a “feminine dating strategy.” We’re telling them not to be douchebags. It’s an MRA fever dream that interprets “don’t be a douche” as “be a wet noodle.”
My feminist dating advice is, “De your best self. Don’t be insecure. Work on your psychological health and your self acceptance.”
It might not get you laid, but I’m not here to get you laid.
My expectations:
1. Women are not going to seep with guys for whom they feel no attraction.
2. The act of physical intimacy is only one small part of full spectrum sexuality. Even mere flirting has sexual content. It is sexualized. This is why women don’t want to be sexualized at work. This is why we “cold shoulder” thirsty men. This is why some men are “creepy” and some are not.
Regarding #2, I suggest that men work on their social calibration. Few people adopt full ask culture, because guess culture is actually part of their sexual experience. Being pursued is wonderful, but only from from some men, not others. Furthermore, not all women want to be pursued at all. (Clarisse Thorn writes about this, contrasting her BDSM from non-BDSM relationships. I’m pretty sure it is in Confessions…)
3. We don’t demand anything particular of men, except professionalism and civility.
(Of course, some women do, just as some men make unfair demands of women. So it goes. Society is not perfectible. My feminism tries to take the world as it is and work from there.)
4. It is reasonable to be frustrated, but because of the hard truths of #1 – #3, we cannot really help you. In particular, we have limited capacity to nurture lonely men, precisely because we are the targets of their frustration.
(Read #4 again. Read it one more time. It’s really important.)
5. The solution to male frustration is either 1) become more attractive or 2) learn to accept. That’s it. Really, that’s it.
Becoming more attractive is hard. Women can try to explain it, give concrete steps, but sometimes they don’t work. For one thing, we don’t always understand our own attractions. For another, we cannot speak for all women. We can say how one man falls short in our eyes, but that does not generalize. Plus, to be honest, do men really want the hard truth? Most women are not going to explain to some guy why she thinks he’s unfuckable.
(Sometimes women do, of course. It comes across as pretty harsh.)
Anyhow, there is plenty of dating advice out there. Most of it is made in good faith. However, it only works to the degree it works. You might do the work but not get the reward.
So it goes. Sex and intimacy are not rewards. They are not commodities. They are not debts. They are things people freely share.
You can do all the work, a thousand times over, and still watch as the pretty girls go home with the cute emo-hair-guy with great cheekbones.
So instead, you learn to accept, or go to r/incels and spiral down the drain. Those are your choices.
I suggest radical acceptance. I cannot do the work for men.
I’m pretty sure the conversation has reached the point where I’m just repeating myself, just further clarifying and summarizing things I’ve already said. I’m done for now.
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arbitrary_greay said:
@Aapje:
I’m not suggesting that this state of affairs is how it should be, nor that one gender HAS to adapt to the other’s standards/expectations. Just that both genders appear to be doing the similar thing of extending their own standards to the other gender (as a part of “gender-blind” equality), but then also interpreting actions of the other gender through their own lens.
I agree that the expectations of social skills for both men and women have in many contexts become onerous, an undesirable expansion of guess culture.
However, I believe that women still experienced that pressure significantly more than men in the past. See, for example, the difference between the diagnoses of autism for women. The current situation is just extending that pressure as equality. Again, I don’t necessarily think that that’s a good thing.
My point is that your stance in this thread is a bit one-sided, putting the onus of change on women. The thread I linked highlights how women feel very similar things about the social dynamics in the workplace. The thread also notes the deciding the onus of responsibility for these cases based on people feeling like they’ve been treated fairly by the other party are doomed to failure. Men setting the standard that women treat them such that the man feels like they were treated fairly has no stable place from which to formulate concrete actions, because just as you point out and veronica d emphasize, people are a diverse bunch.
Your perception that “Alice is legitimized in putting Bob in his place” is only that, an assertion of perception. I disagree that this is actually the social standard, or that society has been trending towards a reinforcement of that. There are just as many scenes where Alice obsesses with her friends over if Bob is signalling her before she signals back. And it’s just straight up disingenuous to claim there aren’t feminists that have raised the point that giving female predators a pass is not okay. From about the most unapologetic SJ blog you can ask for: 1, 2
In reality, millenials of both genders are increasingly favoring social technologies like Tindr that remove such ambiguities and imbalances of signalling.
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Aapje said:
@arbitrary_greay
People don’t have one set of standards for everyone. They tend to have one set of standards for men and one for women. That is what gender norms are! So it is meaningless to say that people have merely one set of male or female standards. There are female standards for women and female standards for men. There are male standards for men and male standards for women.
A lot of men have actually adopted part of the female-female standards and then found out that men who act more feminine do worse or even get harmed by society. If you look at the complaints by anti-feminists, a lot of them boil down to: “I did what they asked and it made my life much worse…and when I complained they shamed and tried to silence me, rather than show a willingness to consider the possibility that their demands on men will harm men until (men and) women stop rewarding masculinity in men and punishing femininity.”
No, the stance of overall feminism/society has been biased, putting most of the onus to change on men. I merely ask that equal onus is placed on women. This looks like I put the onus on women because people are used to making men the scapegoats for gender roles. Equality looks like inequality to those with bias. That is what the Tumblr post you linked was about. Amy Yeung also found that a lack of benevolent sexism is interpreted as hostile sexism.
I don’t understand how the gender difference in autism diagnoses proves that women get more pressure to be social. Do you think that women can hide autism better because they are expected to have more social skills? This makes little sense as it is easier to hide disability if the demands are less. AFAIK, there is no evidence that shows that the greater rate of diagnoses in men isn’t due to biological differences, so assuming otherwise to prove something results in building your argument on an unproven premise.
Anyway, that was just a meta-comment about your reasoning. I’m not arguing against the idea that women get more pressure to gain social skills in general. However, I argued that it is harder for men to achieve sufficient dating social skills because of their gender role.
Imagine taking an adult from a hunter-gatherer society who never got any formal education and have them take high school exit exam and comparing her performance to that of an adult who just finished college, where you have the latter take a college exit exam for what she studied in college. The person to whom you give an easier exam is surely still going to do worse because that person didn’t get the societal support to be able to do well.
I object to blaming individuals for society not preparing them well or arguing that they should be able to fix this on their own or among their own. When black people are doing worse on a certain metric, the argument that they should just work/study harder is never accepted by Social Justice people in my experience, nor the argument that the onus is on black people to change this and that white people have no obligation to help. Yet when talking about (white) men, suddenly the same argumentation is broadly accepted, despite the acceptance than men face structural inequality.
I object to Social Justice often being social justice for some and the opposite for others.
I can’t remember claiming that. Please don’t ascribe opinions to me that I don’t have.
Pretty much every person is willing to accept that a non-zero number of female predators exists. The issue is more that the assumption is often that only a tiny number of severely mentally disturbed women commit these crimes, while a large number of men do it (due to toxic masculinity/rape culture/etc). This is why egalitarians and MRAs who debate feminists often refer to victim survey studies. Note that Ozy is on the fringes of SJ on this topic (and on most topics), as she accepts the evidence offered by egalitarians and MRAs as true. She is a very smart person who was able to figure out that much of the Social Justice ideology is wrong and who steelmanned the shit out of it to get something more reasonable. Most people are incapable of doing so and simply adopt the memes, even if they are based on ‘alternative facts,’ involve double standards, etc. Mainstream SJ is memetically dangerous, like other ideologies build around one or more scapegoats.
Anyway, I believe that as a group both feminists and greater society tend to give female predators a pass, by seeking excuses for female misbehavior as much as possible (often arguing that a man drove them to it), while doing the opposite for men. Note that I said ‘tend’ which refers to overall tendencies and doesn’t assume that feminists or society are the Borg, with one shared opinion.
Your first link supports (part of) my argument, as the writer argues that: “Male sexual assault is a huge issue that no one really talks about. There are people who truly don’t believe that men can be raped or sexually assaulted by a woman. When male rape or sexual assault is portrayed in pop culture, it’s almost always men assaulting other men.” This is a typical argument also used by egalitarians and MRAs. Note that she doesn’t argue that feminists don’t do this and anti-feminists obviously tend to get angry at most feminists for not acting better on this topic, while claiming to be egalitarian.
Whether one finds that anger at feminism reasonable probably depends on whether one feels that people who claim to be egalitarians should act like egalitarians and also whether one believes that feminists as a group are suppressing those who want to address these issues.
LOL. I’ve been told that a common male strategy is to approve everyone and then to make a real assessment for those who approve back. Similarly, dating sites seem to fall into the classic pattern of men initiating and women responding.
If anything it just makes the situation worse as the cost of the approach is less for men, so they are incentivized to just spam women and in turn, women get so much messages that they are incentivized to ignore most messages, never giving feedback to men, and to put little effort in evaluating men beyond shallow markers.
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arbitrary_greay said:
The whole point of the SimonPenner post was to point out that some of the new frictions are because, in trying to change only operating on one standard for both genders, people are instead just taking the standard they have for one gender (their own) and applying it unmodified to the other, without regard to how that clashes with the genders roles everyone has been socialized with for decades.
The “I did what they asked and it made my life much worse…” complaint was exactly the one first championed by feminists themselves, of women no longer molding themselves just to get a man. Now, because attraction (platonic or romantic) for most people nonetheless has been molded by our socialized gender roles and cultural mores, people may end up having traditional preferences despite themselves, which is why people on both sides have thus been burned by trying to break the mold. Assertive, powerful women who aren’t attractive to men, courteous, respectful men who aren’t attractive to women.
Autistic women: https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/viewpoint/women-autism-hide-complex-struggles-behind-masks/
The symptoms are often dismissed as such because of harsher social standards. Girls aren’t as allowed to be weird as boys, and so either their symptoms are reinterpreted by others as within normal variations, or they’ve had to git gud anyway where their male peers’ condition was acknowledged and accommodated. It’s a parallel to your example of how SJ can have double standards of who has to git gud based on race, which I agree with.
“I can’t remember claiming that.”
This is from your example about Alice being able to slap Bob and put him in his place. Those posts from the most SJ of feminists reject that dynamic as acceptable, and argue that spreading that kind of stereotype is undesirable. They wrote those posts exactly to combat those perceptions, and therefore are acting better on the topic.
I disagree that social technologies are so lopsided in this dynamic. For every story of men spraying their online seed, there are just as many stories of people succeeding by using the technology as envisioned, and expressing their relief that the new technologies have allowed them to avoid meatspace dating failure modes.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This is a small thing but it is extra irritating to me:
“It was all job speak—the type of language ladder-climbers use; it was the kind of talk that shuts vaginas down cold.”
argh why are you so sexist
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jossedley said:
Yeah, I agree with Veronica that it’s probably actually useful to clear the air – there are plenty of clueless would be daters out there saying “I’m not socially clued in to know what I’m supposed to do – just tell me what you want” to themselves, but it is funny to see an article that both complains about entitlement and displays it in such great measure.
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Alizarin said:
The reason people “round any conversation about desexualization off to telling people that they have to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with” is because that happens ALL THE TIME.
https://storify.com/gnc_centric/misogynist-and-lesbophobic-violence-from-emilyeldr
https://kaijucourse.tumblr.com/post/160780583889/the-real-ted-cruz-kaijucourse-if-your
http://terfismeaningless.tumblr.com/post/161433657560/dormersboobs-anyone-who-says-that-lesbians
https://translesbophobia.tumblr.com/image/162367759286
I found these with 5 minutes googling, but I run into this shit all the time. I’m scrolling through some “feminist” tumblr blog and I see “women who say they’re only attracted to people with breasts, vulvas, etc are gross fetishists who see their partners as walking vaginas and are incapable of real love.”
The people who don’t say things like that say “obviously having a genital preference is okay. Good thing no one has ever said that it isn’t okay and the idea that lesbians get attacked online for not wanting to suck dick is an evil TERF lie.
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No one said:
Jesus!
This just makes me want to say “Ok then! If this is the standard, let’s add ‘Transmisogynist’ to the growing list of terms I don’t care about being called.”
These people really aren’t helping their cause.
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Audrey said:
‘Also, fashion sense is totally a solvable problem, you can say to your new boyfriend “give me a $500 budget and I will buy you clothes that fit.”’
This kind of avoids the issue that making yourself look attractive to other people is a. supposed to express something about who you are and b. a whole load of work, learning and effort.
I suspect that the vast majority of people want to date a person who had already done the work on their own appearance, not become someone else’s personal shopper.
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nancylebovitz said:
I think part of the issue (maybe the whole issue?) with desexualization is when it’s an effort to damage people’s reputations as worthwhile partners.
It’s not just I don’t like whatever sort of people, it’s no one should want to have a relationship with that sort of people.
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LeeEsq said:
I’ve seen/heard the first sentence happen real life. I was going home on the subway late last summer and overheard two women make disparaging comments about one of their friend’s boyfriend. His crime? Apparently being too short. That’s it. The entire point was that they don’t find short men attractive or boyfriend material and this meant that their friend shouldn’t either.
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Jared said:
To be fair, since I’ve been ragging on rude, picky women elsewhere in this thread, men do this too, except it would typically be based on weight and not height. That is, men disparaging another man for dating a fat woman is a thing that happens.
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Aapje said:
It’s almost as if people of both genders can be assholes.
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leoboiko said:
I guess it’s a bad sign that my reaction to the excerpt was more like “yep, all that sounds painfully familiar. I’m sure glad I managed to switch careers and get the hell away from the software/tech culture.”, even though a lot of their more offensive opinions would certainly apply to me. When I kept reading and realized that I was supposed to be offended, I had to kind of switch gears mentally to follow the rest of the argument.
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jossedley said:
Well, IMHO, the difference between “I’m not attracted to X” and “People who display X and hope that I will be attracted to them are contemptible” is entitlement (and probably insensitivity).
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leoboiko said:
I agree, but in my case it was less about sexual attraction and more about general aversion (not specific to a dating context) to the culture and values I found while working at Google etc.; a negative experience which led me to sympathize with the quoted excerpt even though, in retrospect, yes, it does seem guilty of the same sort of entitled insensitivity as most desexualization discourse re: trans people, black people, etc.
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jossedley said:
I hear you – back when I was working in New York, I’d always get stuck on the elevator with trading bros: good looking, chest bumping young men in fancy suits and french cuffs, who seemed to spend each elevator ride chest bumping and bragging to one another about how awesome they were.
They made my skin crawl, but in hindsight, they weren’t actually kicking homeless people or anything (at least not in the elevator), they were just part of a hyper-competitive subculture that made me uncomfortable. Based on my stereotype, I can guess they probably also had a number of qualities I find actually contemptible, but I’m really relying on the stereotype to make that judgment.
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The Promiscuous Reader said:
Okay, now, this is fascinating and important: “if you’re attracted to men/women, that needs to include trans men/women – otherwise it’s transphobic. if you wouldn’t date a trans guy but claim to be attracted to guys, you’re transphobic.”
I’m attracted to guys. I am not, however, attracted to *all* guys. I don’t think any attracted-to-guys person is attracted to all guys. Often this involves indidividuals, along the lines of “this guy is my type in many ways but there is just no chemistry with him”; often it involves classes of guys, along the lines of “guys who are extremely hairy.” I suppose it could be argued that my lack of attraction to extremely-hairy guys is hair-phobic, but therein lies the problem. (It would also seem to follow that not being attracted to women, as I am not, is gynophobic. Which isn’t true, and indicates that something is wrong with the logic of the person quoted above — namely, that being attracted to some members of any class does not oblige me to be attracted to other members of the same class.) If “transphobic” means unattracted to or unwilling to date transpeople, then it’s not a bad thing to be transphobic.
Of course, many people do try to rationalize their attractions by denigrating the people they’re not attracted to. Probably it’s a human thing to do, but it’s a mistake. If you’re not attracted to someone who’s attracted to you, you should reject them as gently and politely as possible, but you don’t need to make up reasons why, unless they’ve made themselves obnoxious in the process of hitting on you. If you’re not attracted to males, or females, or any given subset of any group, you’re entitled to your tastes and desires. You’re not obliged to be “open-minded” about it. I don’t expect people who aren’t attracted to me to be “open-minded” and date me anyway. That’s another creepy way to try to bully or guilt-trip or otherwise pressure someone who doesn’t want you into putting out anyway. It is not okay. No one is allowed to do it.
It’s a drag if you have trouble finding people who want to date you. I often have been turned down by men I wanted. It’s a drag, it’s sad, but no one is obliged to date you. Luckily, if someone tries to guilt-trip me, even though I am susceptible to guilt from childhood, that is one kind of pressure I’ve learned not to tolerate — or to put onto others.
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Summer said:
sorry, I was distracted from your main point by the way you keep saying the article is complaining about people with poor fashion sense. It’s not. It mentions appearance, what, three times?, and goes on and on about their personality: arrogant, uninterested in their partner, uninterested in anything but their job, and just very alike. “Nerdy, awkward programmer”s are specifically mentioned as being preferable to the type.
also you realise the people in that article ARE dating these men, right
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Paperclip Minimizer said:
On one hand, this is obviously true and important.
On the other hand, if you say something like this in front of a group of twelve angry
menfeminists you’ll get lynched for being a MRA incel misogynist rapist who want women to be slaves faster than you can say “desexualization”. Something about drugs in the water supply making fingers fall off one by one.LikeLike